European travel giant TUI Group is integrating its “destination experiences” business into its global CRM platform, giving it the ability to cross-sell the inventory to customers during the post-booking pre-trip phase.

In the first half of the current year it has managed to reduce these losses, reporting an underlying EBITA loss of €158.6 million, which is a 26% improvement on last year. Turnover was up 7.2% to 6.81 billion euros.

It still sells “package holidays” but has transitioned into a hotel operator, a cruise line and most recently, a tours and activities provider. Or in TUI-speak, “destination experiences”.

TUI’s destination experiences ambitions were brought into the spotlight this year, beginning with the announcement at its AGM in February that this would be a strategic growth area for the business. TUI followed this up with a deal to buy the destination services businesses of Hotelbeds Group.

Another relevant example of TUI’s repositioning is the continued increase in the proportion of business which is transacted online – in the first half of the year the figure was 49%, up from 47% in the same period last year. And the amount of business it transacts itself, direct rather than through third parties, is also on the up, coming in at 74%, compared with 73% last time.

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